Networks generally consist of a number of devices which may include workstations, personal computers, servers, hubs, routers, bridges and switches linked together by physical cable or wireless links. The devices on the network operate in accordance with a protocol to enable recognition of communicating devices and control of the data or traffic between them. Networks may take various forms such as a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). In most substantial sized networks some or all of the devices on the network are managed.
Achieving optimum performance from a network requires devices and links to be set to the best configuration. Mistakes may be made in the original setup and configuration or may arise during modification of an existing network. Presently it is possible to display configurations but the recognition of a non-optimised configuration and correction depends upon the skill of the network manager being able to notice the misconfiguration or lack of efficiency and know how to change the configuration to make the needed improvement.
In general, most network management applications have provided either individual device management or a collective blind display. With individual device management the network manager is required manually to check the configuration of each device on the network in turn and match it up with the configurations of other devices, in the hope of spotting potentially bad configurations. Display applications retrieve the network configuration from several devices and allow these to be displayed in order to enable the network manager to conduct a manual review and again, hopefully spot bad configurations.
Clearly both these methods rely heavily on the individual knowledge of the network manager and time consuming manual checking.